Lax Immigration Enforcement Exerts Magnetic Pull

Amnesty: President Obama often laments "our broken immigration system" as a reason for his failure to enforce its laws. But as a wave of illegals is about to descend here, the hard fact is that it's his own policies that broke it.

The nonpartisan Inter-American Development Bank and the Migration Policy Institute both reported optimal conditions for a big wave of illegal immigration into the U.S. from Mexico and Central America soon. Based on the slowdown in China's economy, a recovery in U.S. low-skilled jobs such as construction, and rising U.S. interest rates, it's fair enough.

But there's also a policy role at work here, too. And the Obama administration's policies actually outweigh the powerful demographic and economic factors that have until now slowed illegal immigration into the U.S.

Until recently, illegal immigration was falling. In Mexico, demographic growth has declined, while average incomes have risen. In 2010 average incomes crossed the $7,000 threshold, a key economic dividing line for many immigrants in deciding whether to stay home or head north, while the U.S. economy slowed. In 2010, net immigration into the U.S. from Mexico hit zero.

But what looked like a big downshift in illegal immigration is being reversed by Obama's policies.

Illegal immigrants apprehended at the border shot up 15% to 421,000 in fiscal 2013, according to data from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while the Border Patrol says they saw a 69% increase in apprehensions at the Texas border in the past six months, according to a report in the New York Times.

Last year ICE reportedly released 68,000 criminal aliens into the U.S. population instead of deported them back home, while only one out of seven encounters with illegals was ever prosecuted, according to CNS.

"Our law enforcement system is in a state of collapse," warned Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama in the Senate Friday, "and it's a deliberate plan by the president of the United States."

Ever since 2010, when President Obama first called for "comprehensive immigration reform," meaning amnesty for 11 million illegal immigrants, and then followed up in 2011 with orders to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to use "prosecutorial discretion" in apprehending illegals, a great wave of immigration has built.

Along with it has come huge surges in Mexican cartel activities in 3,000 U.S. cities, and a major upswing in heroin smuggling into U.S. cities from Mexico. Why? Letting just anyone into the country without any controls is the best way to get the worst of the worst.

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